Online publishers publish various content including text, image, video and audio. An online publisher may want to publish a particular image in various color schemes, patterns, layouts, etc. For example, an online art merchant may want to publish an image of a sculpture which was captured using a camera online. However, the merchant may want to enhance the image in a particular way before the image is published online to demand a buyer's attention. The merchant may want to generate multiple images showing specific portions of the sculpture.
Current publishing techniques typically require the merchant to generate a version of the particular image for each of the different ways the merchant wishes to publish the image. For example, if the merchant wishes to highlight only the portion of the image having the sculpture, the surrounding portions of the sculpture in the image may have to be blurred. In another example, if the merchant wishes to show how the sculpture looks in a particular decor, the surrounding portions of the sculpture in the image may also have to be shown. This requires the merchant to have different version of the images which serves different purposes. This can be a time consuming process since all versions have to be generated before they are published.
Further, the merchant may have to use a special image editing software to generate such images. The drawback of the current publishing techniques is that the merchant is expected to have image processing skills. Further, the process can also result in increased storage space for storing various versions of the particular image. As the number of images increase, or the versions of a particular image increase, a need arises for a robust version management system. All these factors can add to the maintenance costs for the merchant.
The problem increases by many folds if the image has to be rendered based on the device on which the buyer is viewing the image. Different devices can have different display sizes, form factors, resolutions, rendering techniques etc. Not only this requires the merchant to generate various versions of an image to suit the devices, it also requires the merchant to be aware of the devices available or to be available in the market. Further, in scenarios where certain images are not viewed by the buyers, the computing resources, such as processing time and storage space, for generating and storing such images are not utilized effectively.